Creatures Of Your Dreams: 6 Gifts Inspired By Internet-Famous Animals

As the cult classic musical Avenue Q would put it, the internet is really, really great for… animals! Yes, cute animals, weird animals, animals doing strange or amazing things – all of them seem to have staged an internet takeover and everyone has their favorite. And unsurprisingly, there’s a product out there affiliated with nearly every one of them.

Whether you’re on the hunt for a last-minute holiday gift or you’re just looking for a special surprise, why not give the gift of geek with one of these internet-famous creature gifts?

The Best of Bub

If there’s any internet animal that has one the hearts of geeks and the mainstream alike, it’s Lil Bub. Short for Lillian Bubbles, Lil Bub is a dwarf cat with some significant special needs and an incredible owner who has helped take her – and other special needs pets like her – viral. You can bring Lil Bub home in pillow form, on a watch, or even as an adorable plush through the Bub Store and know that every purchase is doing good, since a portion of profits goes to Lil Bub’s Big Fund for special needs pets.

Go Hard, Don’t Care

We all remember the first time we saw this video. What at first looks like a strange mix between a skunk and a weasel suddenly takes off and destroys a cobra and chases after a jackal. It’s a honey badger, the infamous animal that is so hardcore, it doesn’t care about anything at all.

Now you can give the gift of awesome with honey badger digging gloves. Great for gardening – who needs a shovel – or just terrifying your neighbors, these will also double for the claws in your Wolverine costume.

Wonderful Water Bears

Not really a bear at all and actually only half a millimeter in length, water bears or tardigrades are the hot microscopic organism of the minute and are fascinating in their strange powers. What else can go without food or water for 30 years, re-hydrate themselves, or survive temperatures as cold as 1 K and as hot as 420 K? Certainly none of the other strange animals on this list!

You can get a tardigrade necklace showing this funny creature at a little more than life size, and you won’t have to feed this one either. And whenever someone asks what it is, you can decide how much you want to creep them out and name it accordingly.

Leave It Underwater

The tardigrade is surprisingly cute for what it is, but maybe that’s in part because of how small it is. Would a blobfish be cuter if it were really small? We may never know, but they’re definitely cuter in plush form.

It’s true, someone really did make a stuffed animal out of the world’s ugliest animal, and it’s less likely to make children scream than the real thing. We still don’t recommend giving this toy to your young niece, but your weird officemate might be into it.

Also Not a Bear

Like water bears, the last internet-famous creature on our list is also a wannabe bear – the red panda. On a molecular level, pandas are closely related to bears, but red pandas are strangely situated somewhere in between actual bears, pinnipeds like seals and walruses, raccoons, and mustelids like weasels and otters; they’re also a bit cat-like in size and appearance. Though you may not be able to pin them down as any particular thing, red pandas are definitely cute and you want something (or everything) featuring them.

It may be a rule that all nerd ladies (and many nerd men) love weird socks, so why not get on the red panda bandwagon with red panda socks from ModSocks? Or, try to break the red panda’s lazy streak in your own life – red pandas can sleep as many as 15 hours a day – and grab a red panda planner from Papio Press.

Everyone has a soft spot for animals, even if only for animals as weird as we are, which is why these internet-famous fuzzy friends make such great gifts. Or just enjoy them yourself; we all deserve a treat sometimes!